Are there any ingrediants that you would like us to add or correct in our data base. We know that there are some ingredients that are only available in certain regions. We would love to add those as well! So all you Europeans and Aussies let us know what's missing.

You have Carafa 1 to 111 on your database which is the Weyermann roasted barley. It needs to have Carafa Special 1 to 111 as this is their great dehusked chocolate malt. You should be able to get that information from the Weyermann website.

As for the new Australian malts now available Maltcraft will have what you need.

Exciting things happening downunder at the moment will send you an email to keep you updated.

German pale malt from Weyermann is becoming increasingly available. Up to now I have been using the Belgian pale on the ingredient list for recipe calculations.

A thought on the hop section in the calculation section: bittering hop choices seem limited to only higher alpha varieties. I would like to be able to choose from any hop for a bittering selection. i.e., using Saaz throughout for a Pilsner

i dont think you have amarillo on your hop variety choices. i would like to see that added as well as other varieties that you dont commonly see (simcoe) and the other low cohumulone varieties. thats if you havent already added it. i havent looked recently.

How about the ability to input a custom ingredient? We could enter pertinent characteristics into a dialog for the category (Malt, adjucts, hops, yeast, etc.) and then use the result in our current recipe. The dialog would also get loggged so you could review what people were adding and have an ongoing source of update information. Use what people enter, or track down the manufacturer for data as you wish. Regardless, I wouldn't have to make a wild guess about a substitution. It's really frustrating when you can't input a hop by name, even though you can enter it's %AA by altering another named hop.

Helpful Marketing tip. Instead of restating all of the ingrediants that you do not list, I would suggest that you review all of the top ten Malt, Hop and Yeast Manufactures with your list and add all of them. For example, print off the list of ingrediants off of the Briess website, and load all of them. Too many to list but obviuosly all of these should be available in your programs if you want me and others to pay for another subscription to GOLD.

I don't really see the necessity behind adding every maltsters entire product list to the ingredient database. I have been using this site's tools for a number of years now and have been more than content with the ingredient list. Surely we can all find substitutions for certain specialty malts should they not be found on the list. As good as the calculator is, it doesn't brew the beer for us. We still have control in that part of the operation. Therefore, the calculator really acts as a guide for colour, SG, and IBUs. The flavour impact of the endless array of specialty malts cannot be estimated by the calculator, so colour and SG points are really the only issue when trying to input a malt that is not found. If the desired malt is 60 Lovibond, then choose a malt close to that colour rating. If the substitute malt adds a little too much to the SG, then account for that in the results. Listing every maltsers product line would simply make the list too long and unruly. The same goes for extracts too!

The way around would be to allow for custom malts to be added where we could enter in Lovibond and gravity info. Perhaps we could have a manually entered hop field to for those who have access to crazy strains.

jayhawk, I am not sure if you use your BeerTools print out as a record or not, but I do. Most of my recipes are printed out from BeerTools and then have many pencil scratches all over the page to account for all of the changes. I am not sure how advanced of a brewer you are, but many of the ingredients are not simply substitutable. i.e. Briess Aromatic Malt. Most think that it is equivalent to Belgian Aromatic. But that could not be the furthest from the truth. The closest thing in the listing would be a Dark Munich Malt but that is still only half the Lovibond and lord knows you would never want to use Crystal for 50% of the grain! I am not saying that they should list every MFG, but they could at least add the top 5.

geiss - I appreciate having this discussion with you. This forum taught me a lot about brewing, and I care about it. I haven't had a good "give n take" thread with another member for awhile, so welcome - I hope you are finding the site useful. For your info, I am an all grainer, heavily into the hobby, and have produced many a fine brew and some awful ones too.

Part of my reservation behind adding entire MFG product lines is that the category of "the top ten maltsters" depends entirely upon geography. I brew almost exclusively with Canadian malt (Gambrinus) with specialty malts courtesy of Bairds in England. I live in Vancouver, Canada - a very eclectic and "global" city, but there certainly is a lack of selection in brewing malts in the retail sense. One could try and source grains from the micros in town, but I stick with my HBS and my made in Canada grains and love the beer I make, as do many of my friends and family - not mention the folks who purchase the local nectar in droves. While I would love to try aromatic and special B and Caramel Vienna etc., I simply can't right now due to lack of supply in my "hood".

Now obviously you have access to Breiss malts, which is great and the selection and quality they offer is top notch. But since this is a web site open to any and all brewers from across the globe, how do we determine whose malt to rate as the top ten? Would we look at global sales, North American, European? How would we distinguish sales to big commercials vs. micros and homebrewers? And as we surely know, including everyone's maltster would simply make the ingredient list far too long. I would much prefer to have general categories in the ingredient list like we currently have.

But I do think we can both agree that there should be a user defined field where we can input the pertinent characteristics of "other" malts we have access to. That way we all can design recipes to our liking based upon the ingredients we have access to. What do you think...would that be a satisfactory compromise?

This is what i suggested on Dec 24th! I too try to keep records, but my Beer Tools reports end up with all sorts of penciled changes on them. I'm also sure I have probably missed noting a change once or twice, so my records are wrong.

Beer Tools could have ten times the ingredients list it does now, and still miss something. What if somebody does home malting? What about using yeast cultured from that prized bottle?

I too will go elsewhere for a brewing calculator if Beer Tools Gold does not soon correct this for me. It really just makes sense.